Speak! Salon at Vault Virginia
Writing Italy, Living Italy
Author Cheryl A. Ossola on Family History, Fiction & Making a Life Abroad
About the Event:
What happens when the Italy of your family history becomes the place you call home?
Join Speak! Language Center for a conversation with author Cheryl A. Ossola, a Virginia native and longtime resident of Italy, celebrating the release of her new historical novel, How Long a Shadow.
Set in 1903, the novel draws on Ossola's own Italian family history, following immigrants from Viggiù in northern Italy to the granite industry of Barre, Vermont. We'll hear a short reading and talk with Cheryl about the family stories and historical research behind the novel, Italian immigration, and the challenge of turning ancestral history into fiction.
But we'll also go beyond the book to explore Cheryl's own journey in the opposite direction: from Virginia to Italy. What inspired her to make the move? What role did language and her Italian roots play? What does it take to create a life in another country, and how has eight years of living in Italy changed her understanding of Italy, America, and home?
The evening will conclude with audience conversation and Q&A.
Cheryl A. Ossola
Writer and Salon Speaker
About the Speaker
Cheryl A. Ossola is an award-winning novelist, writer, and second-generation Italian American who turned a lifelong dream into reality when she moved to Italy in 2018. A native of Northern Virginia, Cheryl spent much of her professional life in the San Francisco Bay Area, working as a magazine editor, freelance writer, and longtime contributor to San Francisco Ballet before trading California for a hill town in central Italy.
Her debut novel, The Wild Impossibility (2019), won a Silver Nautilus Award in Fiction. Her second novel, How Long a Shadow (Cynren Press, November 2026), draws inspiration from her family's Italian roots and explores immigration, family loyalties, women's independence, and workers' rights in early twentieth-century Vermont.
Cheryl holds a BA in Theater and Speech from William & Mary and an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco and writes Italicus: A Writer's Life in Italy, a Substack exploring Italian culture, history, language, travel, and everyday life abroad. She is also the founder of Teatro Immediato, a theater initiative presenting original short plays to Italian audiences.
Now eight years into her Italian adventure, Cheryl continues to explore the connections between storytelling, cultural identity, and the meaning of home.
Visit Cheryl’s website. https://www.cherylaossola.com/
In 1903 Barre, Vermont, granite is king—and it's killing the men who sculpt it.
While her father and brothers risk their lungs in the granite sheds and the town fractures over union strikes, twenty-year-old Rosina Bottinelli longs for a life shaped by her own hands. Determined not to be bound by marriage, she sets aside her artistic ambitions and turns to midwifery. Her apprenticeship to her formidable aunt reveals both the fierce power and the terrible cost of women's work…read more about Cheryl’s new novel.